The Macintosh is 30 years old today: How Apple changed the desktop computing world

Thirty years ago today, Apple released the Macintosh — the computer that brought the graphical user interface (GUI) to the masses. Since then, the platform has been through hell and back. The Mac became something of a punchline in the 1990s, and it slowly crawled its way back to relevancy after the return of Steve Jobs in 1997. In recent years, the Mac has had a thriving ecosystem, and continues to set trends for the entire tech field.

Inside and out, the Mac has changed drastically over the last thirty years, but one aspect has remained relatively consistent: the all-in-one form factor. From the get-go, the Macintosh brand has largely been associated with the simplicity of an all-in-one device, and that tradition has carried on with the advent of the iMac. While the laptops, towers, and Mac Minis have provided plenty of diversity for Apple fans, the convenient and affordable nature of the all-in-one models continues to impress. In honor of such an important anniversary, let’s take a look at some of the most notable all-in-one Macs ever released.

Macintosh 128K

Released on January 24, 1984, the very first Macintosh computer was an amazing machine for its time. While the Lisa was Apple’s first attempt at a mouse-driven graphical user interface, it was extraordinarily expensive — a whopping $10,000. Just 12 months later, the Macintosh launched at a much more reasonable $2,500.

While this small beige machine doesn’t look like much to modern eyes, this was effectively the world’s introduction to the mouse and the graphical user interface. Without a doubt, this tiny computer was a massive milestone for computing, and it successfully helped moved the entire industry forward.

Macintosh SE

When the Mac SE was released three years after the original Macintosh, it was considered a considerable step forward. Sure, The Mac 512K and the Mac Plus had improved on the Macintosh formula, but the SE was much more substantial. It featured an expansion slot, and introduced the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) to the compact Mac line, but the bigger improvement was the addition of an extra drive bay. Mac users could either buy a Mac SE with two floppy drives ($2900) or a model with a floppy drive and a 20MB hard drive ($3900).

Macintosh Color Classic

In 1993, Apple decided it was high-time to release an all-in-one Macintosh with a color display. Largely targeted at the education market, this model’s expansion slot provided substantial flexibility and backwards compatibility at an affordable price ($1400). It certainly wasn’t the most powerful machine of its day, but the affordable built-in color display was definitely something worth writing home about.

I think I covered that in another post, a few years ago, but can’t remember what it was called :)

davea0511

Lisa wasn’t stolen. Jobs bought it for less than a song. Xerox had no business sense at all. They should have hired Jobs, bank rolled everything and slapped their name on it. Biggest bonehead move of all time. I’ve worked for companies like that where the Dilbert principle reigns supreme. No future there.

Marc Guillot

False. Xerox didn’t sell their GUI to Apple.

Richard Reed

The facts are these, and you can check them with any reliable source: Xerox bought shares in Apple, seeing the potential in the fledgling company. In return, Steve Jobs was allowed to visit Xerox PARC to get ideas that he might be able to use at Apple. He saw the mouse, then attached to a dumb terminal, and immediately saw the potential for consumers and small business users. So no, he did not ‘steal’ the GUI concept – Xerox effectively gifted it to him.
What is less clear is whether Bill Gates had any deal with Jobs to copy the GUI to create Windows, in exchange for keeping Office alive on the Mac, as has been reported – or whether he simply ‘borrowed’ it.
The fact is that very often great inventions are picked up and brought into widespread use not by the inventors, but other entrepreneurs who see the true potential.

Heath Parsons

Despite how I dislike Apple as a company now, they were awesome back in the day when I didn’t care about software, specs, practicality, usefulness, or politics. I remember learning typing and playing math games in 4th grade on a Power Macintosh 5260 with a 100mhz processor. The keyboard had a cover, and the games used like 4 colors, red, green, blue, and white. And I remember getting behind the security system (username and password) by guessing the teacher’s password and I opened up paint and started drawing stuff…and got detention.

On came the G4 and I was thinking man that looks awesome, but this pc has all my games! Can’t afford G4, so I got PC. This is a really summed up article about the Macs themselves, but I like it. Although there wasn’t anything about theft and patent trolling, I see where this article focused, on the products, not the politics.

ackthbbft

My original 1984 128KB Macintosh (later upgraded the internals to a Plus, but still in the 128K chassis) is still in its official carrying case in my closet. I can’t seem to bring myself to turn it into a Macquarium.

Aaron Esbenshade

I was in 1st grade when I saw my first mac, our school got two of them and the kids got to rotate through and once a month I got a turn on it. It brought tears to my eyes when I found out Mac was 30 literally it touched my heart to remember that life changing event.

davea0511

tears? wow. it’ a computer, dude.

praumpy

I’m sorry dave you can’t do that.

Jeremy Garcia

The mac 128k was nicknamed “Beige Toaster” because Jobs wanted the thing shipped without a cooling fan. Needless to say, it suffered from a plethora of issues due to over-heating.

eonvee375

Even if im no apple fan, i lay down my arms to wish you a happy birthday! ^^

James Tolson

for me the Apple Macintosh died when they dumped powerpc in favour of intel based macs, only to be kept on life support by the Macos and it’s overly loyal userbase of photographers and desktop publishing artists..

Computers where to me all about Diversity, this is why im an Amiga user.. Computers in my opinion where great machines designed from the ground up with custom processors, and an integrated Os that worked with that hardware.. The off the shelf IBM pc clone arcuteture we all use today has never had any romantic appeal to me, as it simply bloated software layers running running ontop of Blazingly fast hardware running on a 30 year old design that never will see its full potential before it ends up in an ewaste landfill. sure ibm pc architecture has driven innovation, but look at what we lost on the way..

this brings me to apple.. The mac has always been a beautifully designed Powerpc/68k computer all the way till the mid 2000’s, sure they are more expensive than windows based machines, but i for one did not mind paying extra for a computer that was designed better from the ground up and had a gorgeous Operating system to go with it.. Then apple killed it.. first with the “dropping support for legacy hardware” which im not going into lol. but mainly this some guy walks into Steve jobs office and says this “why don’t we gut our power pc Apple mac G5, Keep the bezel, and fill it with cheap intel based laptop parts instead, port Macos to it.. and sell it for the same amount of money and hope nobody notices? we make a tonne of money Steve.. all u have to is get on stage and convince the world”!!!! this was the moment the Apple macintosh died for me… 30 years old? no way

davea0511

Correct me if I’m wrong but the intel was faster at that point … much faster, and the new architecture didn’t introduce any bugs. Bugs are the result of software not hardware. If they had stayed with PowerPC the required price to compete with the PC at the time would have killed macs as the PC had evolved at that point to blur the line between UI superiority.

James Tolson

unfortunately yes your kind of right there.. at the time the price/performance of x86 and later x64 was better.. and yes from a business decision standpoint i can see why they did what they did, but also at the time apple was making a tonne of money with other products such as Ipod and Itunes.. they could have invested into alternatives in my opinion such as Cell and Better power pc chips.. hell even Microsoft got ibm to make them 3.2 ghz 3 core power pc chip.. A mac based on that in 2005/2006 would have been nice.. :-)

Jerome Kwok

Really, I thought Mac was dead when they dumped SCSI and used cheap IDE drives.

davea0511

They going to run this story yet again in another 5 years … every 5 years into perpetuity? Hey, if you can’t get enough of it just run it every year, or how about every day. Print the dang thing off and frame it on your wall. How much is apple paying you for this advertisement every 5 years, or are you really just a mindless zombie? I’m guessing the latter. Don’t get me wrong … I used the mac 30 years ago … changed my life … but a lot of things did … I’m not going to stop and reminisce every 5 years about it for each and everything thing like that. It’s a bit absurd.

Robert Riversong

What the Mac began was the dumbing down of computers for the masses. The only time I’ve used an Apple computer was in jail to write my legal briefs, as that was all that they had and I was, quite literally, a “captive audience”.

I was fortunate to have learned computer programming when I was a high school junior, using an IBM 360 that filled a large university room, Fortran 2D and punch cards. I then assisted my professor father with statistical analysis on a remote workstation. With my first second-hand PC, I taught my son to program in BASIC, and I wrote hundreds of batch file tertiary programs for my own use.

I have remained with PCs, though I resisted using the Windows OS for as long as I was able, as it was another attempt to dumb down computer use and distance the user from the underlying operating system and programming.

Every “advance” in operating systems has been, to me, a further disempowerment of the knowledgeable user – but this is what passes for “progress” in our consumer culture.

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